Page 10 of A Divided Duty

Melly sniffed. “I don’t see where her likes and dislikes are more important than all the rest of us, but if that’s the position you want to take, I won’t try to stop you. I just wish you’d consider that people love you here.”

“I will. I mean, I do,” I said. “I was looking for the Duke. Is he around here somewhere…?”

“Toby! This is a pleasant surprise!” Sylvester’s voice boomed off to one side, before Melly could respond. I turned to find him descending upon me, arms open and pale cheeks flushed red from the crisp dawn air. I knew it was late afternoon. My hair was probably still warm from the sunlight in the park outside the knowe. But the Summerlands keep their own time, and here, the coldest part of the night was still hanging heavy over everything. “Welcome home, my darling. Welcome home.”

And then his arms were around me, embracing me, and I stood stiff and unsure what to do, letting him hug me.

After a moment he seemed to realize he was hugging me, but I wasn’t hugging him back. He let go and stepped back, giving me a perplexed look. “Toby? You … you are Toby, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, I’m me,” I said. “May’s face is a lot rounder than mine these days, August is still a redhead, and I don’t have any other doppelgangers running around that I’m aware of. How are you, Your Grace?”

“Well, well, I’m well,” he said, tugging the cuffs of his shirt down to better cover his wrists and casting a quick glance around the balcony. “May I assume you’re here to see me?”

“Yes, I’m here to see you, Your Grace,” I said, and smiled as warmly as I could muster. Behind me, Melly crept discreetly away, and I was grateful: it let me focus fully on our mutual liege. “I wasn’t expecting to find you preparing for a party. What’s the occasion?”

As if I didn’t already know. Before Raysel’s blood had been shifted to make her fully Daoine Sidhe, her magic had smelt of mustard flowers. Now, it smelled like crushed blackthorn fruit. And since jars of jam didn’t make very good centerpieces for a formal party, the flowering branches were being used to substitute for the fruits. It was an elegant solution. It might even have been a subtle one, if I were anyone else, but I knew the scent of her magic too intimately not to know bouquets representing the entire ducal family when I saw them.

“Walk with me,” said Sylvester. He turned back toward the door I’d entered through, and I followed him without objection.

Tybalt was still waiting there when we stepped inside. He shot us a surprised look. I shook my head, as subtly as I could, and he nodded, staying where he was as Sylvester walked past him without acknowledgement. I hurried to keep up, and he led me along the hall to a small oak door, which he opened to reveal a study, like something out of a period drama about bored rich people and their boring problems.

Once we were both inside, he shut the door, then moved to sit behind the desk. “Raysel’s term of offense ends in three days,” he said. “My lady has asked me to arrange a celebration of her return. It begins tonight, to let people get the majority of their reveling out of the way. People need to burn off a little steam every now and again, as you well know.”

I stared at him, aghast at how terrible an idea this was. Raysel hated being the center of attention. Even more than that, she still had trouble with crowds. She got overwhelmed easily, and always needed an easy escape route from any social situation larger than just the kids getting together to watch movies in our living room. Throwing a party for her was like throwing a party for a scared raccoon you’d managed to trap in your yard.

“Raysel’s term of offense ends, but only if she and I both agree that she’s fulfilled her debt,” I said. “She lost four months to Titania’s enchantment. You said you understood. You said you would let her stay with us for the full term of offense.”

“Four months that she spent keeping the least children of the Undersea safe from the illusion of her monstrous grandfather,” he said. “A reasonable person would agree that since her debt is to Duchess Lorden, rather than to yourself, that by protecting those children my daughter discharged any remaining offense she might have given to Saltmist.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. He wasn’t entirely wrong, if we were just talking about what Raysel actually theoretically owed: the actual offense had been claimed by Dianda Lorden, Duchess of Saltmist, and she’d simply assigned Raysel’s service to me in the process. Officially, she’d done things that way because she didn’t want Raysel’s presence to upset her husbands, one of whom was the man who’d originally abducted her. In reality, it was because Raysel had begged me to get her someplace safe, and my house was the safest place any of us could come up with.

Sometimes doing things by the rules will come back to bite you in the ass. If Raysel had actually pissed off Dianda badly enough for her to claim offense, rather than just breaking Raysel’s nose or something, protecting the Undersea changelings who’d been thrown into Blind Michael’s lands by Titania’s enchantment would have been more than enough to discharge that debt. But since the reality was that we were trying to give her a safe place to rest and recover, I had to focus on the fact that she wasn’t ready to go back.

“Be that as it may, she only comes back here if she and I both agree,” I said. “And neither of us have said that we do. I don’t know that I can say that I do.”

His face fell. “October … are you truly telling me that you’re going to keep my daughter away from me even longer than you already have?”

I took a deep breath before pinching my nose and momentarily closing my eyes. “I am going to put my foot so far up Titania’s ass that she’ll be able to retie my laces with her tongue,” I muttered. Opening my eyes, I gave him a disappointed look. “You were starting to do so well before she put the whammy on you. You even seemed to understand why it was important that you let me come back here, whether or not it pissed Luna off.”

“And then Titania took my child away from me. Again,” he said. “I am … not a man who does well without his family, October. You saw that, in the lie she spun to contain us all. You know how poorly I received her version of our world.”

“I do,” I said. “Is that why you’re suddenly on team Force Raysel Back to Shadowed Hills? Because you’re afraid Luna’s going to leave you if you don’t take her side?”

He glanced away, and that was answer enough.

“Root and branch, Sylvester, if she’s threatening to leave, if she’s saying ‘Hurt someone else or I’m going to hurt you,’ that’s abuse. I don’t care that she’s your wife. She doesn’t have the right to do that to you.”

“Who else do I have?” he asked, voice growing sharp. “In this world, you have a family of your own, a husband and sisters and a child that you haven’t yet brought to present to me, as your liege, even though tradition says you should have done it. I waited weeks after the birth for you to bring her to me. I sent Jin to Queen Windermere’s court so she could check up on you, be sure you were recovering properly, and you never brought my great-niece to see me. I’m not a part of your family in this version of reality. My brother is leagues below the sea. He hasn’t introduced me to his daughters, either, and I wasn’t invited to their presentation.”

None of this was news to me, but the way he was putting it together made it all terribly damning. He was describing the situation as he understood it, and with every word, I understood why he would be able to yield to Luna’s wishes just a little bit more.

“Sylvester…”

He ignored me, continuing to talk. “My only other niece is content in her own demesne, and since her daughter cannot travel, she doesn’t call on me the way you used to. And my daughter—my only daughter—chooses your company and your household over my own. If Luna leaves me, I will be alone.” His voice dropped, and he looked down at his hands. “I can’t be alone. I don’t do well when I’m alone.”

My heart clenched. For all that we weren’t currently on the best of terms, I loved him. I’d loved him for most of my life, from the days when he was just my mother’s weird fae friend into the moment he offered me the Changeling’s Choice, and from there became my weird fae friend, and finally my liege. He’d been family the whole time, but I hadn’t known it until I’d learned that my mother was married to his brother when I was born, making me Simon’s daughter in the eyes of Faerie, even if we weren’t blood relations. I didn’t want to see Sylvester hurting, even if he was hurting other people in his flailing for some stability.

He was a Duke now because he’d been a hero once. He knew what it was to suffer for the good of others, and how much Faerie would be happy to take away from him if only he allowed it. He knew how much he could bleed.